Enabling the WordPress Theme and Plugin Editor

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When you use Click&Build to set up your WordPress installation, we set configurations and add functionalities to make it easier and safer for you to build your own website.

This is why we sometimes limit functionality – for example, we disable the theme and plugin editors in WordPress for Free Mode installations.

Enabling the Theme and Plugin Editors in wp-config.php

If you use a 1&1 WordPress default installation, you can enable the editors by changing your wp-config.php file. If you use a Managed WordPress installation, enabling the theme and plugin editor is currently not supported.Switch from Managed WordPress to Standard

Security Risks When Enabling the Editors

The first risk is that someone could have gained admin access to your site. When that happens and you have your editor enabled, they could use that to add any code they want. At that point they don’t need SFTP access or anything like that, WordPress already provides all the access they need to modify your site and misuse it.

Theme or Plugin Updates Might Break Changes Made Using the Editors

The second risk is that it makes it really easy to change something in a way that most likely will break when there is an update for that theme or plugin.

In most cases it’s the theme you want to adjust and there are multiple ways in doing that. If it’s only CSS then you should use a plugin (for example: Simple Custom CSS) that has a CSS editor which allows you to change the styling independently of the theme. So when the theme gets updated or you switch themes, your custom CSS is still loaded.

Another way is to build a Child theme. This is a more advanced way of overwriting parts of a theme which is not always that easy. But when you understand how it works, you can do great things with it.

How come after setting up wordpress through 1and1 and making the wordpress account I cant login to wordpress using wordpress.org or wordpress.com? If I need custom work don’t to my site I don’t want to give 3rd party access to my 1and1 control panel. how would I go about doing this? Thanks.

Do you mean the header picture of a theme? You first have to activate the theme, then you can change things like the pictures. The preview only shows you… well… a preview of what the theme might look like. 🙂

The only difference I noted was your screen cap has an option for “background”, in the appearance menu, mine does not. I had to install the ‘define’ line for editor, can I install the define for ‘background’ in the same way?

Why is it that using 1&1 and building my blog in WP that my themes photo do not come up when I log in or anyone log in to my site.
The only thing that comes up are the titles to the post and I have to click the titles to get into that post and information.
I am a newbie but I have done 3 blogs with cpannels and never had this problem before.

this does not answer my question why does my post not come up complete and not just the title. I had to delete 3 post because under 1&1 half of the post does not work properly. I uploaded a click bank information but when I try and post it only part of this post shows up and you have to click on read more to read more information and this is not what I want. I am sorry that I ever went with your company and should have stayed with a company doing cpanel.

I am sorry that this did not help. I am guessing that there is something wrong inside your WordPress configuration – it’s hard to tell from the outside without access to the WP dashboard. That’s why I gave you the link to our migration article. So you might check if you maybe missed an important step in your blog migration.

It’s true, our Control Center is a proprietary tool, it’s not CPanel. So it might take some time to adapt and to find all the settings you need quickly. In our 1&1 Help Center you find several articles which should help you finding what you need: http://help.1and1.com/

Opened the wp-config.php file in cpanel text editor.
Changed define(‘DISALLOW_FILE_EDIT’, true);
To define(‘DISALLOW_FILE_EDIT’, false);
worked for me!
It was changed to true by my wordpress security app called Sucuri, preventing the Appearance > Editor menu from displaying.

When I copy and past my recently uploaded You Tube video address to the site it does not appear as a click though option ie the address is not underlined or highlighted when you hover your mouse over the address and then simply click on the address to access the You Tube video. How do I enable this option please?